Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

Flannery O’Connor, that marvelously gifted American writer of the past century, spoke a simple though profound truth when she said that “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”1 The great fairy tales and fantasy stories communicate the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. Not didacticism but rather the narrative, the dramatic action, makes the fairy tales meaningful. Narrative supplies the imagination with important symbolic information about the shape of our world and appropriate responses to its inhabitants.